6490m.

[mark28]

Huh? People are complaining because they are so expensive yet don't offer good hardware compared to cheaper PCs.

I love building desktop PCs, but I also want good performance on my notebook. I'm in college and can't exactly bring my desktop, so my Mac is all I have.

Exactly. For a $1800 laptop I expect atleast an ATI 6750 in it too. Apple can remove 512 MB from the 1 GB if they want, but don't let it be an ATI 6490m, that's ridiculous for such an expensive laptop.

 

[Evil Spoonman]

It is quite unfortunate that the base 15" offers such a lackluster card, and a pittance of video memory. I am not pleased. It really forces most people who want to do anything remotely demanding into the premium 15".

Really, I think Apple's reasoning on this was that the base 15" is predominantly bought by people who want a 13" with a bigger screen. Whether or not that is true, I don't know. It certainly reeks of marketing. In my opinion the three-tier 15" was the best configuration.

Base 15" $1,600 - 2.7GHz i7 (2620M) / 4GB RAM / Intel HD 3000 Graphics
Midrange 15" $1,750 - 2.7GHz i7 (2620M) / 4GB RAM / Radeon 6570M 512MB GDDR5
Premium 15" $2,200 - 2.2GHz i7 (2720QM) / 4GB RAM / Radeon 6750M 1GB GDDR5


This would give a product to the 13" user who just wants a bigger screen. A product at about the same price point as we have now with substantially more aggressive graphics and a weaker CPU (have the 2.0GHz 2635QM CPU as an added-cost BTO option here for those who need more processing power). Leave the current high-end as is. I feel that this maintains Apple's healthy margin, offers a bit more granularity to the range, addresses the folks who need extra graphics grunt, and doesn't confuse the average consumer.


It's not going to happen, but food for thought.

 

[Mirai 11]

As I've said, compared to what i've got now, the base 15 will run great for what i need it to, i'm not going to be gaming on it, maybe on the occasional emulator, or the new Portal 2 soon, but that'll be it. I dont understand the huge deal towards the 6750. I've yet to see benchmarks with the 6490, i know its only 2 days, but there's a fair few who have gotten them since they were announced.

 

[karohan]

I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I think graphics performance has a significant impact on productivity too and to link a graphics card only to gaming would be unfair. A lot of people need the capabilities of a good card to do multimedia work, academic work, etc. Sure you don't need it for web browsing and word documents, but in all honesty, if that's all you need, a PC is more suited for your needs since Office '10 is still better than Office '11 for Mac.

And at the very least, I think its annoying that Expose would stutter or scrolling slows when there are a lot of windows or tabs open. That affects productivity to a small extent too.

 

[dusk007]

I have yet to come across something on OSX that truly requires a decent GPU. The Intel HD on Arrendale when forced does any epxose and what ever without and hickups. When you look at the whole decode, encode quality of videos Intels HD 3000 is better or as good as both AMD and Nvidia.
If someone doesn't play games or does some 3D rendering, they'd have no reason to buy anything more than an HD 3000.
Those of us who want the all in one package and game on the MBP occasionally and not game enough to justify buying a gaming console the GPU matters and for this the HD 6490 is only to drive customers to the more expensive models.
When you intend to pay almost 2000 bucks everyone who wants to do a little gaming would pay the 20% extra to get 100%+ more 3D performance. Smart from Apple sucks for anybody who would rather pay less and was hoping for a 6750 with 512MB which you will find in notebooks for a third of this price.

 

[karohan]

I have yet to come across something on OSX that truly requires a decent GPU. The Intel HD on Arrendale when forced does any epxose and what ever without and hickups.

I disagree. Arrandale's Intel chip has plenty of hiccups with stacks and Expose animations (unless of course you disable BeamSync or something like that). I guess my hiccups I mean significantly/noticeably slower than the Nvidia doing the same animations. And these are with simple animations, not more user intensive tasks.

 

[Macmadant]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I played SC2 last night on low/medium settings and it ran fine. If I set it to medium, the game would stutter every 9-15 seconds or so.

I can say for a fact that it runs better than the late 2010 13" MBP with a 330m that I used to have.

I was really considering trading this laptop in for the higher-end model, but I was reading that the higher-end card still only plays at medium settings. I wouldn't mind seeing a side-by-side comparison.

The 330m runs SC2 on high in OS X without stuttering. It's runs very smooth at 1680 x 1050. This just shows that the 330m is actually much better than the ATI 6490m which can't even run SC 2 on medium.

I highly doubt the ATI 6750 can only play it on medium.

edit: And the MBP with the ATI 6490m has even a Quad core.

Is he actually talking about a 15" one? Seems to me he's confused, a 13" never had the 330 nvidia chip.

 

[prism]

Someone run 3DMark 06.

A 320M equipped MacBook Pro would score ~4400.
A 330M equipped MacBook Pro would score ~6100.
A Radeon 4670 equipped 21.5" iMac would score ~6900.

So, someone run 3DMark 06 under Windows, and tell us the score.

I would do it myself, but my 15" is a CTO (hi-res glossy) and won't be here until next week. I have my 8GB of memory, Momentus XT, VMWare Fusion and Office 2011 sitting here, waiting for it. Hasn't shipped yet.

Actually, the 330m gives a score of 6707 according to this link:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/apple-mac-os-x/488330-macbook-pro-2010-core-i5-review-gaming.html

...and can be pushed to 9000+ if you OC!!!

 

[ddoolin0]

Really?
You spend ~2k on a brand new laptop and then you want people to buy an xbox on top of that? "Play good games on iOS" lmao, is that a joke?

Whatever the specs might be on the lower end version, that is really an idiotic statement

Uh, yeah. I don't think the MBP was ever intended top be a dedicated gaming machine. Therefore, if you REALLY want to play games, go get something that has been built for gaming. Perhaps if all you had was $2K, you shouldn't have gone and dropped it on a laptop that obviously doesn't suit your needs.